RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS | Metagame

[Music] hello and welcome to Pocket Gamer not bizzy's YouTube channel and this is the in-app inspector with me John Jordan so today we're looking at raid the game new game from poll areum Gopal areum pretty well known as a free-to-play mobile game developer doing mainly 4x games in the past raid is its first kind of look at a more peachy squad based turn-based RPG RPG but using a lot of the kind of techniques that it's learnt through it some kind of previous years of developing more 4x game or 4x games more based around a meta game so I've done a previous video about the kind of gameplay mechanics of raid so check that out if you're interested in that I'm not really gonna go into a lot of detail at

all on the gameplay side of raid as much as there is a gameplay so this is really about the more kind of focused meta game side of things which is monetization engagement and retention so I've just loaded up the game you can see here the first thing I see is this kind of retailing so it's a game that takes a lot from I get guess three kind of the 4x kind of genre 4x onre I kind of created by machine zone MZ now with games like game of war and mobile strike these are games that weren't really downloaded in very high volumes but were on a per user level very very highly motorized so this is just part of it I mean a very small part of it really I don't think many people because they see the sacred daily pack is available for them 29 pound in UK money or whatever

that would be in kind of $40 or something like that they're gonna go oh yeah I'll go buy that but this stuff's always days it's clear when you play these types of games that monetization is is Palvin [Music] okay so again we see so the first retailing has clicked off we can now get a starter pack which is probably start packs tend to be quite good value actually so this is like 10 pounds you know what that would be $15 $14 and we're getting 12 champions 360 hours of double xp Gems and silver so if you were gonna spend money this would be a pretty good way of spending money start packs always well worth the value oh there we go beginners video so there you go this is

not so much monetization of course as kind of retention and engagement so I don't know much about the game to begin with let's go and here this chap talking about what I need to know okay so this is the kind of starting screen so I've been playing this for a little while now not a massive amount being to see up here in the top left hand corner I'm level 18 so not know where and I've unlocked some of these elements in the game which kind of give you extra kind of engagement I suppose so lots of if you see kind of look around the screen it's quite busy a lot going on lots of red dots red dots mean that this something to be clicked upon so it's just quickly kind of work our way through these are not monetization per se this is more to be the metagame and kind of German engagement so this boring pit so the spy appears somewhere where

you can just kind of level up your characters automatically leveling up is limited to kind of a level cap depending on on their highest status and you can see here I've only got there's only one slot open I need to spend some gems gems of the hard currency so I need to if I want to unlock a second slot I need 300 gems when you got 130 so clear monetization kind of a decision to be made day if you want to do that so there we go I've just leveled up this character and now she's gone from level she's now level two and it's gonna take 33 minutes to get to the next level I can outbreak the slop again so again another kind of layer of spending the hard currency okay what's going on the market so the market is a is a soft currency market so we can see at the top of the screen there's a energy system

typically happens in these kind of games I've got like tons of energy so I've got one thousand one hundred and thirty eight units of energy when my limit is supposedly only 69 I'm still in the early stages of the game you know I've got ten of ten of these refill tokens for the arena then I've got the silver which is the soft currency and then got the gems which of the hard currency so you can see here I'm currently logged into the UK App Store so showing this in UK pounds so if a typical from this kind of monetization kind of view point where I can have the smallest amount I can spend is five pounds and the most is 100 pounds and you can see area for five

pounds ago one hundred and seventy five gems for a hundred pounds I get four thousand two hundred and they're kind of adjusted the ratios are better the more I spend that's pretty well understood in terms of free to play game mandalas ation as we're in the shop let's have a look through through the shop seat see what else is there so this is mystery shard it's just on a timer so I've got one free one so I'm gonna get a free mystery shard there I just doesn't do anything at the moment I've just that's in my inventory we can go and look at that in a minute there's an ancient shard here I've got another five five-and-a-half hours pretty much to wait for that I mean see here more packs so rookie pack [Music] preachy person under pound an ancient single pack you see some of these are limited so they're all limited so all

these kind of packs you don't really get when you first start play the game you don't really understand kind of the value of these things we can just see this a lot a lot of different things going on here there's silver so just buying this soft currency if you can spend $100 100 pounds row just buying this silver currency we have these shards of void shards spend a hundred pounds buying pack a five pack of void shards see here's a bank before gem shop so once we have gems what can we do with gems we can do XP boosts we can get energy we can buy shard packs we can buy clan boss keys name changes means cook quite esoteric kind of sort of stuff we have daily at a daily end progression so these are the kind of things we've seen before in the other retailing where we

are buying kind of bundles of things that were getting shards to unlock new characters as well as soft currency energy hard currency startup act we've seen that before sacred pound a sacred founder pack I gave seen that before and they may have read passes so again these are our subscription models so subscription is something that free-to-play mobile game developers are always looking at certainly something Apple is encouraging in the way that it allows people developers to take more of the money that flows through to them from this point of view and so in this case two options a silver raid pass so this is for a month so we get a seven-day trial and after the trial we're paying this case nine pounds every and we get they've 20% more XP and 20% more silver from our campaign battles

for a month again this is fairly esoteric is it doesn't you know getting you know getting gems you're getting it not getting kind of any characters is just basically going to get 20% more rewards from doing the basic stuff for me that's a little bit of a hard sell but for some people generally with these kind of monetization options they generally pay off because otherwise it's um it's kind of free money for them in the sense that they're just getting you faster through the game so why would they kind of nickel and dime you wrong currency they're dollars but why would they shortchange you I suppose from that point of view again never the gold red path so this is six months so compared to the Silver Age Richard one month here we get six months and we're getting a slight discount so 46 pounds but getting similar rewards so in terms of if you

want to kind of spend money there's plenty of options to do so let's kind of come out of the shop so where we were was the market so this is where we're spending soft currency although awfully soft quality is attached to hard currencies so these are just things we can buy but we can see here we're not really getting a lot of good stuff so you can see ax man it's common the major killer is common any one star as typically tends to be the case with soft currency scenario so it's kind of worth its really actually come out that so what else is going on here so I've been doing some stuff and these kind of games are very good in terms of when it comes to kind of engagement that pretty much any small thing you do you get rewarded for so in this case I fought in the arena five times and I can claim I mean not particularly great rewards its XP a

silver and it's some sort of elixir and there's things I've done here so I've won campaign I've you know pretty much anything I do I get rewarded for you see here's a long list of things I can get rewarded for on a monthly a daily weekly or monthly basis and then kind of one-off achievements see you change your username yeah great but it all plays into it to me being involved in the game which I am again challenges so I've cleared stage three of the magic keep so I claim unless a magic potion three of them in fact well see here another thing so if I win a campaign battle using full champions of level 20 or higher I can claim something there there's you know and all these kind of things have built in very deeply into

how you interact with the games as well call it meta game and in and of themselves are not particularly interesting but it just means as I stopped playing through the game suddenly all these things start unlocking and pretty much anything I'd do certainly in the early stages this game I would still say I'm in the early stages of the game still within the first month pretty much anytime I come into the game there's stuff for me to collect there's rewards it makes me feel good the whole kind of dopamine kind of kick and it's really kind of Bulls down to champion so this is the kind of core of the game we all just kind of quickly play a level play something just to see but um the champions we can see they're kind of actually for a mobile game pretty high res and we for a console game this wouldn't this wouldn't really kind of count very much but um for a mobile game you know played quite a lot of these score based RPGs obviously hardway always gets better so you expect

them to these characters to look kind of better as time goes on but they're pretty good nice animation you know decent level decent color characters I'm not anything particularly outrageous I don't think things we haven't seen before basically it's Dark Elf we have a this one here was an oak and then we have a kind of a sacred order whatever that means barbarian he looks pretty barbarians name so but from just from a general graphic point of view graphical point of view it's pretty good and in terms of what we can actually do with these things this is the characters actually really matter because it's an RPG so we can go into just going we there's a few it's going to the portal so this is a basic kind of looping the game that I've got these mystery charge you saw me click one before I've got three mysteries yards

and two ancient shards and his void shards that we could have bought in there in the marketplace and we can see here that the mystery girls not not very good so the the best ones I can get from there are rare ones the ancient relics only get rare epic and legendary you know as you go down as he says become more valuable you get better characters uses a bit of soft currency 500 not very much but we just get some of these see here we got we've got a war boy as you would expect in an RPG all these characters are useful in the sense you can use them up if they're not very useful troglodyte I mean he looks pretty pretty impressive and you say when it comes to kind of graphics of the game but he's level one trouble right so he's not gonna be very useful he's only good to be consumed by a better character so this is the last one of these so you can forget and we get out here fairly

generic night so come out of that but we've got to earth of these shards which yeah the next level up you can see compared to 500 silver these are twenty thousand but I've got 100,000 120,000 of these so who we got here we've got a walk type character so he's rare three stars could be someone would be useful and we get the final one we get a Giuliana over she is sacred order epic okay so that's where we yeah and then a bit of retelling and then if you know whatever ticks on these things but who presumably they fire them up because people do so I can't summon

anyone else so let's go in and look at my note but look quests have come up I have summon three champions today so I get a reward not very much a bit of XP bit of silver going to see my champion so this is where all my chambers are we can see his different levels oh just wait that's oh so this is this one who just got who we just summoned so she's a level 4 characters that's pretty good have any got the other any other level four categories this auction and I've got this Juliana so what can we do with these characters well we can go to the tavern and we can start doing a bit of levelling up so as I said before a lot of these kind of low level characters they're not any use in love themselves now so I've got two level 4 characters

and quite a lot of level 3 characters and some level 2 characters you know they're pretty useless by this stage so let's pick the Juliana and then we can just start to use up some of these other ones so you can see here it's gonna I'm gonna upgrade it's gonna take her from a level 1 to the level 11 so they're saying who my sacrificing there's a high level character at level 3 or kids just making sure I know I'm doing which I sort of do beer as a kind of a currency so not great again get her up to level 18 okay so some of these a lot so I may want to go in and just see yeah so she was the character who we had in the

sparring pit so I might want to change that and put a different character in and maybe put that character instead come back here okay okay so that's that leveling up done I've come consumable those characters and now the next thing to do is see where I am with gear so there's a have a character the character has an XP and you can see this one has he's level 18 of 40 this one is level 19 or 40 I mean can't see goes with the stars really this one's 24 of 30 but you can collect stars and or you can kind of

a it's called ascending so you can ascend characters as you can get the resources to do so but this new one we've got so we can see here some red dots here so when it comes to artifact is he's kind of a gearing system so we can go this is kind of stuff you just clicked through playing the game too much detail on this it's kind of RPG mechanic so these these are things that are artifacts I have that are not attached to any character so again it's a starring system so I'm gonna not going to do it so I'm gonna just going to randomly choose some stuff to equip I want to kind of equip them in sets because that's just how gearing works it's difficult to see but that each each of these sets when you when you equip

two or more of a set then you get these kind of an extra kind of bonuses nope come back so yeah it's just be quick and just kind of sort some of this stuff out so quick that what else will be missing that missing a so probably do this a bit better but it's just a quick soshe's I make you can also go in you can kind of upgrade this kind of stuff and this kind of levels levels on upon levels so this character here yeah I've got some mods we've got artefacts gearing skills and then mastery so we are can add some mastery here collected some Scrolls which mean we can do some of this anylock masteries

on two branches that same time as well you see you already in the early stages weeks is a fairly complicated game it's using some some standard kind of routes we'd expect in an RPG but it's quite complicated the layering has quite strong monetization there's lots of things we can do I mean there's four currencies I mean even in the sense of at some point we might run out of energy we can spend our gems to get more energy to do stuff again by increasing a Chavez level in the tavern three times again a small amount of reward it takes through and this is just kind of a retention mechanic it's just I'm doing stuff and then I'm getting some more rewards so kind of like thinking this game's enjoyable from a psychological point of view and even stuff here so now against

daily logins and I'm gonna get some new player awards I've played os is saying I'll pay this is the second day I've played if I play for five more days I'm gonna get this reward this is kind of gear stuff you can see here that I'm collecting talking then going we wanted to go back here to the character and see probably going really quick stuff again this one here a mine so this is a mine producing gems the hard currency but it cost me 500 to unlock it in the first place so that's kind of like again another nice memorization technique that I'm gonna

have to if I want to do that I have to go in and I have to buy some gems I need to spend what are we on need 500 so I would need to be buying 730 actually doesn't new be spending 20 pounds to do that in order to kind of mind some more so I would say this game is is aggressive in terms of monetization not that being aggressive is a bad thing but this game isn't aggressive but it is very nuanced in terms of its amortization there's lots of things you can do really what I probably want to do is even now have a go well I've got I've got a lot of three-star characters but really if I'm gonna want to progress through I wanna stop summoning some of these more kind of ethic legendary characters so the moment I've only got four Star epic characters haven't got any legendary one so maybe five star characters I'm gonna get through the game much quicker if I can start to some of those but then if I go

into here I need to get some of these sacred shards it's gonna work it's gonna cost me that for kind of currency but haven't got a nice yard so I'm going to go into a shop and try and work out how can get some of these ancient shards and that's gonna cost me money too so so it's kind of a you know a honed a very honed experience the most important thing I think is in all these games have to be fun games so let's quickly go in and do a um I'll do an arena because they're pretty quick so I'll go in and I will probably going to lose these because these are higher rent than me anyway let's go in and I will do a quick battle okay so let's choose her so she's got a special skill something see here might

the levels of my characters are lower than the levels of the other my team powers low as well so I'm probably gonna lose but just to give you a quick idea of what he looks like in action different modes is the arena mode there's campaign modes and dungeon modes but also play going at two times speed just to kind of fight through these things so these characters are just doing their different attacks they are you know attacks and they have some kind of support modes as well and you can see here that I'm losing and I've lost pretty much you lost but that's that's what it looks like if you want more in depth into the kind of gameplay from the gameplay modes

go and check out another video but this is the in-app inspector from Pocket Gamer up is where we go through and play free-to-play mobile games and go into detail about why these games might be successful in terms of people playing them and where they might be successful in terms of people spending money in them two things are not always related but often they are and in this case I think it's a a really strong visual a game that's very strong kind of a game design loops and very strong retention and monetization loops which is kind of a least needs to go together all these things you can't just take money off people you need to people spend money because they enjoy the experience than that then they enjoy spending money and then they spend more money that so that's how the loop works for successful free-to-play mobile games and you haven't played it I would I would recommend you checking out raid from pool area so available on iOS and

Android devices now globally and yeah thanks watching the video if you have any comments please stick them in the comments box happy to read your comments but thanks for watching and hope see again soon you